VARIOUS

America Is Hard To Find (Multi-Trax ZB-176) 1970

I supposed you could loosely place America Is Hard To Find in the same category as psychedelic rock masses by The Electric Prunes and Mind Garage. At least side two anyway which is credited to John Hostetter, Alan Sorvall and David Turner. Their music definitely has the feel of the times: raw, both electric and acoustic, heavy one moment, subtle the next, sometimes experimental and unstructured, pausing for a passage of raving red-neck poetry on ‘Credo’. Lyrics for the most part are of the damaged brain-fried hippie variety, often inscrutable without the assistance of ludes, but connected by recognizable choruses of Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Benedictus, grant us peace, and the like. Side one contains three spoken word poems (no music) by radical priest Daniel Berrigan: ‘False Gods, Real Men’, ‘Trial Poems I’, and ‘Trial Poems II’, all inspired by a civil disobedience experience. Label says produced by Steve Rathe for The Festival Of Life. Pretty cosmic stuff that out-weirds even Pat Berkery. (The Archivist, 4th edition by Ken Scott).